Disability Benefits Assessments

Florence Eshalomi Excerpts

Tuesday 1st February 2022 Westminster Hall

[Florence Eshalomi (Vauxhall) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Gary. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Marsha De Cordova) for securing this really important debate and for her powerful opening words.

In June last year, I held a virtual roundtable with disabled constituents and organisations from Vauxhall, which the Minister’s predecessor attended. At that meeting, my disabled constituents powerfully relayed a range of experiences of navigating the benefit system. Their testimony has certainly stayed with me. Listening to them speak, it was clear to me that the system is not fit for purpose and that disabled people simply do not trust the DWP to understand their lived experience. They spoke of a welfare system that was too focused on what disabled people cannot do, and not on what they can do. They said that the system was accusatory and uncompassionate, and the application process too difficult to navigate. They made it clear that they did not feel that the assessments were based on their needs; instead, the assessments felt like exams that had the power to alter their life.

At that meeting, the Minister’s predecessor said that he understood the need for change, but when I followed up in writing to pass on a number of suggestions from my Vauxhall constituents, I received no response. Warm words are not enough; disabled people need action. Ministers need to grasp how important these problems are for disabled people, and how complicated it is for them to navigate the benefit system.

Shamefully, disability is often a barrier to economic empowerment, because so many parts of our society remain fundamentally inaccessible. The result is that 42% of families that need disability benefits are in poverty. Many of them belong to the poorest and most vulnerable groups in our society. However, the PIP statistics from October 2020 for my constituency of Vauxhall show that 26% of claimants had their welfare entitlement reduced, and a further 32% had their applications dismissed altogether. At a time of hardship and pandemic, when so many disabled people have faced difficulties and have had to go without essential care and support, those numbers are staggering. They represent disabled people being abandoned by the DWP when they needed assistance the most. They also symbolise a benefit system that is broken.

I am encouraged to hear that the Government will propose concrete changes in a White Paper that is based on the responses to the Green Paper. However, given the many delays and disappointments that my disabled constituents have experienced at the hands of this Government, I can understand why they doubt that those changes will ever come. Will the Minister guarantee that further proposals in this area will be co-produced with disabled people who use the benefit system? Will she guarantee that the system will provide people with a stable income that is sufficient to enable them to proactively empower themselves; that it will deliver equality by offering disabled people more independence, choice and control; and, crucially, that it will treat people on social security with dignity, fairness and respect at all times? By delivering on that, the Minister could finally start to rebuild disabled people’s broken trust in this Government.